Edith Proctor, the woman who taught me to crochet and in doing so opened up a world to me that I could never even have imagined, would have both cringed and said “I told you so,” if she could see my current project.

The march to a thousand crochet squares has, at its foundation, more than a thousand crochet remnants, myriad pieces in assorted shapes and colors leftover from the many projects I have made over the years.

Edith, while always very proud of my progress as a crocheter, was also somewhat appalled at my tendency to start one project, go onto five others, and then circle back to finally finish the one that launched all of the others. “You should finish one project before you start another!” she would tell me, but her admonishments, however true and well-intentioned, had no effect on my behavior.

But if I were the same well ordered and exact person Edith was, I never would have had the opportunity to do what I am doing, and what I am doing along the way, is learning how to take disparate things (assorted sizes of crochet circles, solid crochet squares, granny squares), and work with them so that when all is said and done, they fit together into a cohesive whole (in this case a crochet blanket) that is more than the sum of its parts, and in need of weaving in the ends of those many parts is where I found myself this morning:

There were a lot of ends to weave in and then trim, as well as a few errands to run. Luckily, at this point in the project, the pieces are very portable, so while I found myself having to wait a few minutes here and a few minutes, those few minutes were often more than enough time to weave in ends on a square, or two, or if I was really lucky, three, and by late afternoon, I only had forty-eight ends left to weave in before I could start work on round three of the rehab:

I have learned important lessons from every crochet project I have ever made, and while I don’t know exactly what lessons I will learn from this foray into crochet rehab, I know that there will be something that I can use as I move forward, one stitch at a time.